Henry: The secret secret life of Dick Cheney

Thursday

Jun 28, 2007 at 12:01 AMJun 28, 2007 at 5:53 PM

Vice President Dick Cheney is in the news again. No, he has not wounded any more lawyers - they are currently out of season - but the curtain has been drawn back on this classic man behind the curtain.

Reg Henry, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

Vice President Dick Cheney is in the news again. No, he has not wounded any more lawyers - they are currently out of season - but the curtain has been drawn back on this classic man behind the curtain.

He recently surprised everybody by advancing the view that he is not part of the executive branch and, being in a hitherto unknown branch of government, his office does not have to follow the pesky rules about handling classified information.

Cheney is famously secretive. For all we know, he may have classified himself as a state secret. The guy is so secretive he won't tell his legs what pants he is putting on.

This latest constitutional theory seems to be at odds with his belief in the unitary executive theory, which, as you know, holds that the vice president is the unit that provides thoughts to the executive president, in case he should need any.

This week, The Washington Post has been probing the unprecedented power and influence of the vice president. The series by Jo Becker and Barton Gellman confirms with exhaustive reporting what most of us long ago guessed.

In the ancient world, all roads led to Rome. In the American empire, all roads lead to the vice president's office. Or as the Post reporters wrote: "The president is 'the decider,' as Bush puts it, but the vice president often serves up his menu of choices."

This is a very kind assessment. To an uncouth commentator such as myself, it seems more like Cheney usually deciding what the decider will decide, which allows the decider to feel good about himself without going to Albania. Whether it's torture or taxes, Cheney is the man.

Cheney chooses to work in the shadows. While no puppeteer likes the audience to see the strings, what motivates someone to be so sinister and furtive? Some who posted comments on The Washington Post Web site simply put it down to him being evil, which I think goes too far.

Applying theological concepts to members of a faith-based administration could backfire. After all, Cheney is both omnipresent and omnipotent, two of the attributes of divinity, and we should beware taking his name in vain, at least while Guantanamo Bay is still open for business.

The explanation for his arrogant and outlandish behavior, I believe, rests in his childhood. While my musings are merely those of an amateur psychologist, you get them free here and so you can't say you are not getting your money's worth. I think that Cheney is just painfully shy - painful both for us and for him.

My guess is that the young Dick would go off to a secret location to talk to an imaginary friend. While the identity of the imaginary friend may never be known, he was probably a cheerful fellow who loved to be around other people in uniforms, gave everyone nicknames and mangled the English language.

It is matter of record that when Cheney got older, the draft board wanted him to be in the Army. But the military is no place for a shy person, what with all the milling about in the barracks and the showers. So he got multiple deferments, which was just as well, because in Vietnam the Viet Cong were notorious for not respecting anyone's privacy.

Even today, when he is not secretly running the country from his office, his favorite place is in a duck blind, because if the ducks can't see him neither can al Qaeda.

It must be a torture to him to be flushed out into the open by news-media scrutiny. But this is to be expected. Nature abhors a vacuum - and this is true even when the vacuum exists between the president's ears.

In the absence of obvious leadership, this is a strange time in American politics. The Democrats, who were given the keys to Congress by voters desperate for change, especially an end to the folly in Iraq, have been busy trying to find their spines. They put them in a bucket somewhere for safekeeping, but the bucket got buried under a pile of political calculations.

So nothing much happens as Congress fiddles and Baghdad burns. Meanwhile, Bush still goes through the motions. He struts in his well-tailored suit, pedals the exercise bike to nowhere and makes vacuous pronouncements.

If Bush were smart - huh! - he might realize that his buddy Cheney has hurt his administration more than all its critics put together. As it is, Americans seeking answers turn their attention to that man behind the curtain.

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